Facebook Beginning to Integrate WhatsApp into their App

Back in 2014, Facebook bought one of the most popular messaging apps in the world. WhatsApp. And Zuckerberg paid about $19 billion for the app. Since then, we’ve seen all kinds of new features make their way into WhatsApp, including a Chrome extension to message your friends without using your phone. One of the other features that WhatsApp built in was the ability to call your friends. So now you can call your friends straight from the app, and it won’t use your minutes, but instead it’ll use your data. So it’s basically VoIP calls.

We’ve been wondering when Facebook would integrate WhatsApp with the rest of their products, because well why not? Facebook has begin testing WhatsApp integration into their app now. However it appears to be internal testing as we haven’t seen it in the public beta just yet. But basically at the bottom of the post, where you see Like, Comment and Share, there is now a button that has WhatsApp’s icon and says “Send”. Obviously, that allows you to send that post to any of your WhatsApp friends. Which is pretty cool.

If that’s all the integration that Facebook does with WhatsApp, I think people will be happy. Many are not happy with Facebook and what they do. In fact, we heard that when they bought WhatsApp a lot of people were quitting WhatsApp. Same thing happened when they bought Instagram though. However, we don’t know how far Facebook is going to go when it comes to integration. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more integration inside WhatsApp from Facebook. Maybe integrating the news feed into WhatsApp or just status’. Might even see Facebook avatars and Whatsapp avatars syncing with each other. It’s tough to say what Facebook has on tap right now for WhatsApp, but hopefully we learn more soon.

However, if Facebook only integrates the two platforms this much, I could see them keeping the two platforms separate. After all, Instagram has mostly stayed separate. Sure you can see what your friends have liked on Instagram from Facebook, but that feature was available before Facebook bought Instagram.